She Will Melt With Desire

Here's some flarf poetry derived form a day's-worth of unsolicited email (SPAM) subject lines:

She Will Melt With Desire (35 SPAM msgs)

She will melt with desire
Lengthen it fast and simply
The Goodliest solution, mandibular ravened,
has not been done in pregnant women,
they have not been reported facility

Watch your rod grow in a matter of weeks
Feel your male superiority
How would you like to have your ad on 2 Million Websites
You look really stupid rosslblanchard

Porno Stunning for rosslblanchard
forbear bhutto? - Guten Tag, IIncrease once
and fforever your sex drrive NNothing will stop you!
Dance in the sheets all night long - Cater to your
lassie by enhancing the dimension
of your main love tool!
You look really stupid rosslblanchard

Masculine power at its best
Susan's dissatisfaction with the invested overseas,
20 times the level of 1983. All kinds of
Titanic dimension without much effort!

Rocket rod pleases girls
Make it longer and more powerful
You look really stupid rosslblanchard

Rolex? - Click here I choose... I order...
I enjoy... Stylish accessories from
Undelivered Mail Returned to Sender
Celebrities oops pictures here
You look really stupid rosslblanchard
what a stupid face you have here rosslblanchard

Power Negotiating Made Simple - 3 Rules
Make your weapon esteemed
Act your fantasies out
Make all your fantasies come true

Your fantastic love rod grows
¿La Familia o El Negocio?
First Banks Last Notice!

You look really stupid rosslblanchard
what a stupid face you have here rosslblanchard
The circle is now complete - Watch the lady
of your dreams melt before your very eyes
You look really stupid rosslblanchard

This Is Just To Say

I put this short video together with a couple friends - Charity Heller Hogge and Ben Nystrom. We're riffing on the William Carlos Williams poem "This Is Just To Say".



Here's the Wikipedia article on this poem and one on WCW - just to offer a literary criticism and some background on the author. Feel free to leave your own TIJTS versions in a comment below.

Must clean up!

It's already 11 am Eastern and I need to write something here to make it look like this blog is somewhat active.

I had forgotten that I gave out this URL when submitting a piece of writing to Yankee Pot Roast which was published today. It's sort of like getting unexpected company and having to tidy up the place quickly. Don't mind the dirty socks and the dishes set on the arm of the lay-z-boy.

If you're a YPR fan or keen on literature in general, check out my mySpace profile and send a friend request if you're so inclined.

Wordstock

Portland will look a little less pasty and pigeon-toed next weekend as all the dorks will all be at Wordstock, the big-ass book/literary festival at the Convention Center.

If you've gone through the list of authors on tap for this year, you might be asking yourself "Who the hell are these people?" Last year there was Dave Eggers and Joyce Carol Oates (JCO ). This year, however, any one of us might be able to bump many of these speakers if we're getting double-digit hits on our online journals.

The speakers are overrated, though. It's crowded when the popular authors are speaking and hard to find a seat. Also, you get to see what freaks some of these authors are in real life and it can ruin your taste for their work. Last year I spent about five minutes listening to JCO chortle on about how loud and irritating the speaker two stages over was, until I got sick of it and wandered over to listen to that speaker, mostly out of spite for her prima donna manner. Honestly, I have more fun at the booths - chatting with the publishers and the self-published authors, teasing the people from BookTV who are too nerdy to function.

So, I've scanned the list of speakers and I think one may be able to make an afternoon of it on the scant literati and a couple of the gems that are lurking just below literary celebrity-dom.

Harry Shearer is probably this year's JCO. I'm not sure what he's hawking or what he has to talk about, but it's always interesting to listen to Shearer. In order to see or hear him, though, you'll probably have to sit through the Rudolph Chelminski talk just prior in order to secure a seat. Shearer is on the Powell's stage at 3pm on Saturday.

Matthew Diffee is a cartoonist for The New Yorker, and published a book last year called The Rejection Collection: Cartoons You Never Saw and Never Will See in The New Yorker. I have this book, and let me tell you, it's hilarious. There are about a dozen cartoonists featured in it. It's interesting to see some of the stuff the New Yorker rejects. Unfortunately, Diffee didn't make prime-time at the fest. He has a Sunday afternoon speaking spot on the Powell's stage at 1 pm.

Nigel Jaquiss, a Pulitzer Prize-winning, investigative reporter for Willamette Week, is part of a panel discussing investigative journalism at 2 pm on Saturday. Don't stand too close to Jaquiss, though. He's pissed off enough of the Portland powerful that there's probably a contract out on him. You wouldn't want to be getting an autograph and be hit by a stray bullet.

Peter Sagal is the host of Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me! on NPR and the author of The Book of Vice: Naughty Things and How To Do Them. I've heard him interviewed on public radio about this book where he talks about attending swinger parties and going to private sex clubs. He comes off as being rather prudish, though, which is annoying. I won't be buying the book, but the talk should be interesting. Sagal is on the Powell's stage Saturday at 11am.

If you go to Wordstockfestival.com you can find a list of speakers and a schedule. I noticed that Dave Eggers is on the list of writers, but he isn't on the speakers schedule. I intend to write McSweeney's this week to ask if they're coming up and if perhaps Eggers is part of that contingent.

If any of you want to chime in on your picks for speakers and other events at Wordstock, please do so by commenting below.

Hillary or Barack?

Hillary.

Pluses

1. Universal health care
2. Super-smart and accomplished
3. Female. It's about time
4. Tough. Stands up for herself
5. You get Bill

Minuses

1. Too hawkish on Iraq
2. Not someone I'd like to "have a beer with"
3. Has robotic laugh.
4. Bitchy
5. You get Bill

Barack

Pluses

1. Son of an immigrant
2. Person of color (We need that)
3. Relaxed and genuine-acting
4. Sensible. Straight-forward
5. Speaks to rural, Mid-Western concerns
6. Young

Minuses

1. Weird name
2. Too "black"
3. Looks to be wearing eyeshadow
4. Ideas seem too logical
5. Not "black" enough
6. Too young

Iso Sika (Big Pig)

I dug up an old song the other day that consistently cracks me up no matter how often I listen to it. It's called Iso Sika, which in Finnish means "big pig". It's by Da Yoopers, a band from Ishpeming - a city in the western portion of Michigan's Upper Peninsula (U.P.). That side of the U.P. is overrun with people of Finnish descent and in the last hundred or so years since their immigration, they retained a remarkable amount of their culture - their Finnish names, the bland food, their love of vodka and hockey, a sauna in every backyard, a snowmobile in every garage, as well as their peculiar sense of humor as illustrated in this song. Da Yoopers get their name, incidentally from the term used (often in a derogatory fashion by outsiders) for the residents of the U.P. - "yoopers" or "U.P. -ers."



The song's more common name is "The Killing of the Big Pig", and its matronly-sounding singer, Bertha Hintsala, begins the tune in Finnish and then repeats the lyrics in English. Here are the first two verses:

For sixteen years we fed that pig
He looked just like a hippo
Then he broke into the root house
And ate up all the potatoes.

Ma got steaming mad and said,
"It's time to make some bacon."
The pig killers came to kill the pig
And so did all the neighbors.

And, of course, nothing goes right. Why write a song about killing a pig if things go smoothly, eh? I think that's what's so funny about this song is that it plays on rural stereotypes, especially the notion that these quirky yoopers are a simple folk and perhaps the only people who would go to the trouble of writing a song about killing an offending pig.

So, have a listen and enjoy.



Note: This song appeared on the 1987 Da Yoopers album "Culture Shock" along with the more popular songs "Second Week of Deer Camp" and "Rusty Chevrolet".


Note 2: Read up on the Yooper dialect HERE

Note 3: Find out about Yooper culture from Prof. Kate Remlinger with whom I shoveled snow, ate pasties, etc. in the Keweenaw. - Kate's BLOG, Kate's profile at Grand Valley State.

File Under Beautiful Maladies - Scarlett Johansson Sings Tom Waits

It's been almost a year now since Scarlett Johansson announced that she would record an album, and a quick look back at the music blogs (cynical as they are) shows a reeking trail of negative pre-reviews. The doubt doesn't seem to lie with whether a beautiful young actress can also be a musician, but whether a beautiful, young actress with a somewhat proven singing voice possesses the vision to pull off an entire album of Tom Waits covers. Yes, Tom Waits, Mr. "Downtown Train", the "Black Rider", whose gravelly, carnivalesque dirges are brilliant but heretofore his exclusive domain.
So, I've been reading these Waits' fans' posts where they encourage the public to save their money and just buy Waits albums instead of "Scarlett Sings Tom Waits", the intended title of the Johansson album. They're writing this even before they hear Johansson's work. Well, hell, it's a safe bet, but for the adventurous music lover this is an opportunity to experience what could be the elevating of Waits to the likes of Cole Porter, Hoagy Carmichael and ... dare I say? (I dare)... George Gershwin.
Well, isn't this how it happens after all? Your music is good; people cover it. We all knew the Beatles were immortal once their tunes made Musak. Waits maybe isn't as accessible as the Beatles or as the old standards, but take note, just last week at a conference I witnessed over a hundred bankers rush to the dance floor and perform their tight little '80s twists to AD/DC's "You Shook Me All night Long". This was well before any of them could have consumed enough liquor between then and the last conference session to be even a bit tipsy. So in the age when Angus Young's righteous riffs are getting banker ladies all excited, Waits' stuff doesn't seem that far out to be brought into the mainstream by a talented singer.

Allow me to beat this dead horse: What would have happened if Hoagy Carmichael purists had poo-poo'd Ray Charles' rendition of "Georgia"? Would it be that state's song right now? Patsy Cline made "Crazy" famous when the song's writer, Willie Nelson, didn't have the rep or voice to do so. Now the song is both of theirs. And then there's "Stardust", another Carmichael standard, that was violated by the likes of Louis Armstrong, Artie Shaw, Frank Sinatra, Billie Holiday, Dizzy Gillespie, Nat King Cole, Mel Tormé, Connie Francis, Harry Connick Jr, Ella Fitzgerald, Django Reinhardt, John Coltrane, and other talentless hacks (all sarcasm intended).
This project probably seems weird to many because this sort of thing isn't done any more these days and certainly not by top celebrities. Maybe by hanging out with Bob Redford and Woody Allen, Johansson has been injected with a little nostalgia - pardon the disgusting innuendo, although I could have mentioned something about creative juices, too. With these iconoclastic influences mentoring her, Johansson could do well by passing on, instead of the usual dreck spewed by our pop idols, some good taste and some class to the rest of us, especially to those of us who are still clinging to "alternative" music like the name still means something.

Granted, this album could go either way - train wreck or Emmy nominee. But for the sake of illustrating the potential this project has, just let me remind you of a little-known single back in the mid-nineties that revealed Kurt Cobain's talent for lyric-writing. Tori Amos covered Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit" as a ballad. She exposed, beautifully, some remarkable lyrics that had been undecipherable by most listeners. So, again, vision is the key with Johansson's project.

I know I'm eagerly awaiting this October, 2007 release. It'll be on my iPod before you can say, "Christmas Card from a Hooker in Minneapolis".